The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675
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Just how heavy was the hand that blighted the land, how desperate was the state of the colony as it pursued its struggle with the Indians and its scramble for tobacco profits, can be seen in the savage indictment written by Capt. Nathaniel Butler, the departing governor of Bermuda who stopped off in Virginia en route to England. A partisan of the Smith faction in London, an enemy to Sandys’s governing group now reinforced by the Earl of Warwick, Butler had no incentive to look kindly on the scene he found, but his charges, though perhaps exaggerated, were essentially true. The colony, he reported to the company, was set in “infectious boggs and muddy creeks and lakes” that generated disease. New arrivals came at the worst time of year and had no shelter or assistance, “soe that many of them by want herof are not onely seen dyinge under hedges and in the woods, but, beinge dead, ly some of them for many dayes unregarded and unburied.” (Others would claim that the dead were “so litle cared for that they have lien untill the hogs have eaten theyr corps.”) The price of food was astronomical, largely because of engrossing by the leaders who controlled the Indian trade. “Their howses are generally the worste that ever I sawe, the meanest cottages in England beinge every way equall (if not superiour) wth the moste of the best”; they were located “improvidently and scatteringlie” and lacked “the least peec of ffortificacion.” All of the industrial projects had collapsed, and people simply “laughed to scorne” the company’s ambitious prospectuses. “Tobacco onely was ye buisines,” and no one gave a thought to anything else. Government was capricious, and anyone who urged conformity to English laws and customs was held in contempt. If nothing was done, and soon, to clear up the mess, the colony “will shortly gett ye name of a slaughter house.”12
Replies to Butler’s stinging eyewitness account were immediately drawn up, one by “divers of the planters that have long lived in Virginia” together with several mariners who had recently been there, another officially by the company itself. But the charges, though partisan, could not easily be refuted and in fact were substantiated by private correspondence that reached the company—despairing letters, like that of Thomas Niccolls who, besides cursing the lack of food and the false expectations the servants had arrived with, explained that the overpriced women did nothing but devour food without doing a decent day’s work. Laundering had therefore been neglected, and poor tenants “dye miserablie through nastines, & many dep[ar]te the world in their own dung for want of help in their sicknes.” Women should be sent over, he wrote, “whether they marry or no,” just to clean the place up and tend to the sick.13 But the letters of the young Richard Frethorne, one of the passengers on the Abigail who had contracted to work as an indentured servant on Martin’s Hundred, convey something of the inner experiences of the servant population struggling to survive.
Two months after his arrival in Virginia, Frethorne—literate and eloquent, of a respectable family, and with reason to hope for social advancement—wrote one of his sponsors in England that he was in a “most miserable and pittiful case both for want of meat and want of cloathes.” The starving servants on the plantation when he had arrived “fell to feedinge soe hard of our provision that itt killed them … as fast as the scurvie & bloody fluxe did kill us new Virginians.” A pint of meal had to serve a man three days, he reported. He had only one ragged shirt left, one pair of hose and shoes, and one suit of clothes. “I am like to perish for want of succor & releife,” and he begged his sponsor, amid flurries of citations of the Bible, “to redeeme me,” “have mercy uppon me,” or at least take up a collection in the parish to send him what he needed or to purchase his freedom.
To his parents he was more explicit. Servants like him “must worke hard both earelie and late for a messe of water gruell and a mouthfull of bread and beife.” They lived in constant terror of attacks by the Indians, who now could use guns as well as the English could, and in any attack the plantation people would be completely outnumbered. Half of the servants aboard the Abigail who had shipped with him to Martin’s Hundred were already dead, and two more were at death’s door. “Ther is nothing to be gotten here but sicknes and death.” He was in rags; his cloak had been stolen by someone who sold it for food; he was eating in the course of an entire week what he ate at home in one day. The one person who had befriended him “much marvailed that you would send me [as] a servaunt … he saith I had beene better knockd on the head.” If you love me, he wrote, “redeeme me suddenlie, for wch I doe intreate and begg,” and if that can’t be done, “then for Gods sake” take up a collection to send food. “Good ffather, doe not forget me, but have mercie, and pittye my miserable case … if you love or respect me as yor child, release me from this bondage, and save my life.” And then in a long afterthought, he said that his master, William Harwood, had warned the servants that he might not be able to provide for them all and might have to set them loose.
Then wee shalbe turned up to the land and eate barks of trees or moulds of the ground. Therefore with weeping teares I beg of you to helpe me. O that you did see [my] daylie and hourelie sighes, grones, and teares, and [the] thumpes that I afford mine owne brest, and rue and curse the time of my birth with holy Job. I thought no head had beene able to hold so much water as hath and doth dailie flow from mine eyes.
If Frethorne was ever sent the “succor & releife” he asked for, it came too late. He died within a year.14
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Death was everywhere. Race warfare ground on relentlessly, and the new arrivals who survived “seasoning” struggled with disease and disability. None of Sandys’s prized enterprises succeeded—not silk production, iron or glass manufacture, grape growing, or timber development. Nor could the workers assigned to company lands to produce sustenance for officials of church, schooling, or state be kept from slipping off to private plantations where conditions were somewhat better. And the private planters increasingly ignored the company’s—and indeed the Crown’s—pleas for agricultural diversity and concentrated more and more on the one clearly successful cash crop, tobacco.15
When in 1624 the company was forced to acknowledge its bankruptcy and its charter was annulled, the cost in human lives of its great adventure could, in part at least, be estimated. A polyglot, polyethnic collection of more than 8,000 men, women, and children from various parts of England, the continent of Europe, and Africa had arrived in Virginia under the company’s auspices. A census of 1625 listed 1,218 still alive. In the single year 1622 close to 1,000 had died of disease or starvation or had been killed by the Indians. More than twice as many people died of disease that year than were killed in the massacre. The death toll among the natives would never be known, but thousands of Indian villagers, whose people had lived for centuries along the banks of the James and Chesapeake Bay, had been driven into the interior. The near-complete success of their desperate, bloody campaign against the English had initially restored their confidence and given them hope. Though increasingly pressed between the English on the east and ancient enemies on the north and west, they continued to resist and desist in alternating cycles, ultimately planning for another, final, apocalyptic assault on the invaders of their land and the challengers to their spiritual security.16
The English, who both repelled and attracted the Indians as they probed their exposed borders, continued to lead fragile, disordered lives in an unfamiliar, dangerous environment, pressing against threatening people no less disoriented and fearful than themselves. The settlers were still sheltered in small, lightly built, dirt-floored dwellings scattered haphazardly amid crudely cultivated, stump-filled tobacco fields and cattle farms, some with produce gardens and small fields of corn and other crops, cut out of Indian hunting grounds. Most of them were servants—“slaves,” they were frequently called—working off their indentures, often side by side with their masters, hoping eventually to acquire a parcel of tobacco land of their own or return to their original homes. The Africans among them—twenty-three in 1625—were of indeterminate legal status since they had no contracts, and thei
r social status, though debased, was unclear.17 The social order as a whole, in the struggling colony’s pell-mell scramble for survival and profits, was chaotic.
Some representatives of England’s ancient, highly structured civil order remained: one of the original four adventurous sons of the West family, for example. And a few more such arrived: George Harmar, brother of Oxford’s professor of Greek; Nathaniel Littleton, son of North Wales’s chief justice and brother of the chief justice of common pleas; Edmund Scarborough, of Norfolk gentry. But the romantic, highly placed adventurers of earlier years were gone. George Percy had fled as early as 1612; the learned Whitaker had drowned; the benevolent Thorpe, who had been welcomed in the colony as “an Angell from heaven,” had been murdered; the scholarly, worldly Pory, pining for his books and intellectual fellowship, had abandoned Virginia’s “solitary uncouthnes”; and the litterateur George Sandys, as soon as his brother’s governorship of the company ended, had returned from what he called his “exile,” published his translation of Ovid, resumed his place among Lord Falkland’s circle of poets, wits, and scholars (“one of the last great societies of England’s golden age”), and became a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber.18
In place of these well-educated, well-connected adventurers, and in place too of the soldiers of fortune like Smith, Kendall, and Newport and the battalion of mercenary “hammerours” whom the company had sent out to drive back the Indians, a new generation of local leaders was emerging in Virginia. They were the first of the successful tobacco farmers and small-time Indian traders whose positions rested on their ability to wring material gain from the wilderness. Some, like Samuel Mathews, started with large initial advantages, but more typical were George Menefie and John Utie, who began as independent landowners by right of transporting themselves and only one or two servants. Abraham Wood, who would become famous for his explorations and, like Menefie and Utie, would possess a large estate and important offices, appears first as a servant boy on Mathews’s plantation. Adam Thoroughgood, the son of a country vicar, also started in Virginia as a servant, aged fourteen. William Spencer is first recorded as a yeoman farmer without servants.
Such men as these—Spencer, Wood, Menefie, Utie, Mathews—were becoming the most important figures in Virginia at the end of the company period, engrossing large tracts of land and dominating the government. But their successes were not independent achievements. With the collapse of the Virginia Company, the major figures in large-scale English corporate enterprise lost interest in the colony. In their place as financial backers and commercial managers came a new generation of small-time English merchants, who plunged into the now highly competitive, still small-scale free-for-all of colonial exploitation. Some of the newcomers had prospered in the English provinces, some were City shopkeepers, some were ship captains, some lesser City merchants excluded from the monopolized overseas trades. And a few had themselves once been planters in Virginia; prospering moderately, they had begun marketing their own products by joining forces with traders operating in London. At the same time, small-time shippers in England took advantage of the headright system to acquire land in the colony by shipping servants and thereby became absentee plantation owners and codevelopers with associates in the colony. The planters in Virginia and their new commercial collaborators in England, linked in various kinds of associations, pressed for increased production, which meant increases in the amount of land under cultivation, and that in turn meant a constant increase in the size of the labor force. The intensifying pressure to populate the land was a measure of their escalating ambitions.
The whole enterprise was wide open. By 1634 there were 175 London merchants in the Virginia trade; by 1640, there were 330. They and their hustling collaborators in the colony—some formal partners, some family associates, some simply ad hoc trading affiliates—were close to the actual work of production and marketing and were aware of the profits that could be realized by quick escalation of tobacco production and aggressive pursuit of the Indian trade.19
By 1630 the outlines of this new planter-merchant regime were clear. But in no traditional sense were men like Spencer, Wood, Menefie, Utie, and Mathews, who were patenting large tracts of land and controlled Virginia’s Council, a ruling class. Like the suddenly elevated and universally despised Governor Yeardley, mocked for his plebeian origins and his vulgar display after receiving a knighthood, or like the public-spirited William Peirce, whose “capacitie … is not to bee expected in a man of his breedinge,” they lacked the kind of social authority, the “personall aucthoritye & greatness,” the “eminence or nobillitye” that in this post-Elizabethan society would lead “everye man subordinate … to yeild a willing submission wthowt contempt or repyning.”20 Only with the greatest difficulty, if at all, could distinction be expressed in a genteel style of life. Their status was never beyond competition. Mathews may have created a flourishing tobacco estate and Menefie had fruit gardens, but the great tracts of land that such men claimed were almost entirely, in European terms, raw wilderness.21 They had risen to their positions, with few exceptions, by brute labor and shrewd manipulation; they had personally shared the burdens of settlement. They succeeded not because of, but despite, whatever gentility they may have had. A few were educated, some were illiterate; but what counted was their common capacity to survive and flourish in frontier settlements. They were unsentimental, quick-tempered, crudely ambitious men concerned with profits and increased landholdings, not the grace of life. They roared curses, drank exuberantly, and gambled for their servants when other commodities were lacking. Rank had its privileges, and these men were the first to claim them, but rank itself was unstable, and the lines of class and status were fluid. There was no insulation for even the most elevated from the rude impact of frontier life.
By the early 1630s the more aggressive among them had seized control of the colony’s government to assure themselves of constant increases in land grants, despite the Indians’ resistance, and of free access to the Indian trade. They had also begun to move west to open trading camps along the middle and upper reaches of the York, Rappahannock, and Potomac rivers while they consolidated their control of the coastal plain. In 1634 they sealed off the entire coastal territory, enclosing some three hundred thousand acres by means of a six-mile-long palisade that stretched between the James and York rivers approximately forty miles inland from the Bay. The barrier, built of wooden planks behind a six-foot ditch and maintained by settlers granted fifty acres for their work on the palisade, was never an effective fortification. Within a decade the boards were rotting and the ditch was overgrown, but the palisade was important nevertheless. It served as a declaration of the English conquest of Powhatan territory and as a symbol of English exclusivity; it was an unmistakable line to be maintained between the once intermingled English and Indian worlds. Cleared of the presence of Indians, the newly opened boundary area—the Middle plantation, it was called—quickly attracted ambitious planters, whose crude initial clearings would in time become the town of Williamsburg.22
Among the most aggressive of the new planter-traders driving the expansion forward was the young William Claiborne, a Cambridge-educated son of a Kentish merchant family, who had arrived in 1621 with the lucrative commission as Virginia’s surveyor of lands. Elevated to the ruling Council and to the post of secretary of the colony, he quickly acquired several patents of land for himself—a total of one thousand acres, at Kecoughtan and on the Eastern Shore—and a license to trade with the Indians. In a scouting expedition north along the upper shores of the Bay, he found a surprising number of private traders at work, perhaps as many as one hundred; some of them were mariners temporarily engaged in petty barter with the natives. Suspecting that the ultimate sources of much of the furs on offer were far inland, Claiborne conceived of a major enterprise based on large-scale trade with the Susquehannock Indians. These tribes, reaching south from deep inland to the head of Chesapeake Bay, drew on sources of furs as far north as Canada. Claiborne’s
imagination soared: he envisioned a “vast fur-trading and colonial provisioning network up and down the Atlantic coast.” It would be centered on a spacious island he found at the northern end of Chesapeake Bay, which he named Kent Island, with an annex on the smaller Palmer’s Island fifty miles farther north, at the mouth of the Susquehanna River. He would draw furs via the Susquehannocks from deep interior sources to Kent Island and trans-ship from there to markets in all the colonies and in England and the Continent as well.23
With this elaborate plan in mind, he returned to England in 1629 and put together a partnership that was as strong in funds as it was in political connections. The key figures were William Cloberry, already deep in the Newfoundland and Guinea trades and in marketing American tobacco; Cloberry’s father-in-law, Humphrey Slaney, a founder of the Newfoundland Company and an investor in half a dozen major trading companies in Europe and the Middle East; Sir William Alexander, secretary of state for Scotland and proprietor of Nova Scotia, already engaged in the Canadian fur trade; and Claiborne’s kinsman, the great London merchant Maurice Thomson. Backed by this powerful team of investors, Claiborne returned to Kent Island in 1631 with a start-up staff of twenty servants, over £300 worth of supplies, and a royal commission to trade in New England and Nova Scotia. He quickly “acquired” the fifteen-thousand-acre island from the friendly Metapeake Indians and began clearing the land and constructing a fort, houses, wharves, mills, warehouses, gardens, and marketplaces.24